FERRARA, Italy - Venice's Jewish ghetto is better known, perhaps, but by no means was it the only one in Italy. In the mid-1500s, Ferrara had become a haven for Jews fleeing hostility elsewhere in Europe. The Este dynasty invited Jews here and allowed them to prosper as farmers, merchants, doctors and rabbinic scholars. There once were 10 synagogues and as many as 2,000 Jewish people in this walled, north Italian city. By 1626, conditions worsened when the Este family moved to...

Trude Chester fled Germany and the Holocaust for Kenya and never saw her parents again. The 101-year-old Chicagoan shares memories and photos of her childhood with only a select few - including Jonas Trittmann, a young German who has become important to her. The 19-year-old grandson of Nazi youth group members might seem like the most unlikely of confidantes. But their friendship is the product of a unique internship on a quiet North Side block, where Trittmann lives among dozens of...

Documents on the Dreyfus affair, art by Soutine, Chagall and Modigliani as well as other art and artifacts tracing Jewish culture from medieval times to the 20th Century go on public display on Sunday when the new Musee d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaisme opens its doors in Paris. In the heart of the Marais, the city's old Jewish quarter, the $37 million project was financed by the French government and the city of Paris. The museum concentrates on the history of the Jews in France.

PBS has acquired a patina of cool since "Downton Abbey" and "Sherlock" arrived, but public television can't -- and probably shouldn't -- shed its stodgy image. Cases in point are a pair of nonfiction series premiering within the next month, both centered around the stuffy, slightly ponderous form of the on-camera presenter: " The Story of the Jews ," Simon Schama 's five-hour dissertation on Jewish history; and " Your Inner Fish ," paleobiologist Neil...

Israeli President Chaim Herzog made a trip into Jewish history Wednesday when he visited Worms, the ancient Rhenish city whose 1,000-year-old Jewish community, like so many others in Germany, vanished in the Nazi Holocaust. Herzog, who was accompanied by West German President Richard von Weizsacker, said the town symbolizes "the great and tragic drama of European Jewish fate." Hundreds of people, some waving Israeli flags, lined the streets when the motorcade moved through...

The story of the Jews, involving so many grim waves of persecution, expulsion and mass murder, is not for the faint of heart. Neither is Simon Schama's account of both Jewish creativity and travails during antiquity and the Middle Ages. Schama's "The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words (1000 B.C. - 1492 A.D.)" is the first of two volumes tied to a five-part BBC and PBS television series airing March 25 and April 1. In concert with the television documentary (which I have yet to...

By Arnold Jacob Wolf. Arnold Jacob Wolf is rabbi emeritus at KAM Isaiah Israel Congregation in Chicago. Some of his writings have been collected in the book "Unfinished Rabbi." | December 2, 2001

The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of the Jewish People By Jonathan Kirsch Viking, 317 pages, $24.95 Twenty-five years ago, William Sloane Coffin and I taught a course at Yale that we titled "Offensive Passages in the Bible." He discussed difficult narratives in the New Testament, like Jesus' rejection of his own mother and his cursing a tree or his enemies. I talked about the binding of Isaac, the genocide of the Canaanites and Ezekiel's mad...

CAIRO (Reuters) - The Arab League on Sunday endorsed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's rejection of Israel's demand for recognition as a Jewish state, as U.S.-backed peace talks approach a deadline next month. The United States want Abbas to make the concession as part of efforts to reach a "framework agreement" and extend the talks aimed at settling the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "The council of the Arab League confirms its support for the...

Joyce Goldstein, one of America's foremost chefs and cookbook authors, shows how the Jews helped shape the delicious flavors of Italian cuisine during the last 2,000 years in "Cucina Ebraica, Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen" (Chronicle, $29.95). Goldstein unfolds 120 Italian recipes with surprisingly Jewish roots, such as sweet and sour squash, lamb filled with rice, double-crusted carrot and ginger tart, and a classic Roman Jewish ricotta souffle. She writes about the...

Dennis Aron's mother never talked about the family she left behind in Germany at age 16. As the Nazi persecution of Jews escalated in 1937, her parents used their only travel permit to send her to live with relatives in Chicago. Years after Aron's mother died, the Skokie resident summoned the courage to learn more by opening a small red plaid stationery box that contained letters, handwritten in German, that his grandmother had sent to his mother in 1938 and 1939. ...

The family traces its roots to the House of David, king of ancient Israel, while 20th Century branches of the clan extend through a dozen nations to include members of the British aristocracy and its American equivalent-Chicago politics, of course. So when the tribe of Shaltiel organized its first international family reunion here, it wasn't exactly a Norman Rockwell scene of kinfolk roasting hot dogs down on grandpa's farm. "Our family is old. The name is...

Oskar Schindler inspired the Oscar-winning movie about his heroic efforts to save more than a thousand Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. The true story of diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who rescued more than 100,000 Jews has inspired several films (one starring Richard Chamberlain), documentaries and even a Spanish television series. Less well known is Peter Bergson, a relentless advocate for Jewish refugees who created the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of...

A video presentation and program that describes Jewish life in Chicago's early days will be presented Sunday at the Chicago Historical Society, 1601 N. Clark St. "Romance of a People: The First 100 years of Jewish History in Chicago 1833-1933," will show how the community developed and its impact on the city. Sponsored by the Dawn R. Schuman Institute for Jewish Learning, the Chicago Jewish Historical Society and the Chicago Historical Society, the program will use rare...

By Dan Williams and Matt Spetalnick NEW YORK/WASHINGTON, Sept 30 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will warn President Barack Obama at a meeting on Monday that Iran's diplomatic "sweet talk" cannot be trusted and will urge him to pressure Tehran to prevent it being able to make a nuclear bomb. While Obama will attempt to reassure Netanyahu that he will not act prematurely to ease sanctions on Iran, growing signs of a...

Until last week's tragedy in Israel, it took only five words to define my take on life: a shande far di goyem. Roughly translated as "a scandal in gentile eyes," that Yiddish phrase was my moral gyroscope. It was drilled into my thinking during the 1940s, a byproduct of growing up on the border between a Jewish and a non-Jewish neighborhood on Chicago's Northwest Side. We lived, in fact, in the very last apartment building with Jewish tenants. Just beyond our back porches, the world of the...

FERRARA, Italy - Venice's Jewish ghetto is better known, perhaps, but by no means was it the only one in Italy. In the mid-1500s, Ferrara had become a haven for Jews fleeing hostility elsewhere in Europe. The Este dynasty invited Jews here and allowed them to prosper as farmers, merchants, doctors and rabbinic scholars. There once were 10 synagogues and as many as 2,000 Jewish people in this walled, north Italian city. By 1626, conditions worsened when the Este family moved to...

When Shimon and Devora Goldstein and their children, an Orthodox Jewish family from New York, moved to Chicago eight years ago, their transition to the Midwest was made easier through an unusual North Side social service organization for Jews. The Goldsteins were aided through Agudath Israel of Illinois, 3555 W. Peterson Ave., which opened in 1963 and has become a major resource for Jewish education, along with providing an array of community services for all ages. For the...

* Austria marks anniversary of Nazi "Anschluss" on Tuesday * Jewish population now 15,000 compared to 195,000 in 1938 * Jewish community growing in confidence but vigilant * Far-right Freedom party polling 20 pct before elections * Austria airbrushed Nazi history for decades By Georgina Prodhan VIENNA, March 10 (Reuters) - Marina Plistiev, a Kyrgyzstan-born Jew, has lived in Vienna for 34 years but still doesn't like to take public...

Every journalist's nightmare is the interview with the subject who responds to questions with one-sentence (or even one-word) answers. Fortunately, the writer Nathan Englander - who was in Chicago recently as the inaugural Crown Speaker Series lecturer at Northwestern University's Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies - is apparently incapable of brevity. Ask him a question and he's off to the races, speaking quickly and comprehensively, each answer a complete essay in itself. A native of Long...